You’ll notice that after us talking about how Werewolves need a new legendary creature to rally behind, we ended up getting the might Tolovar, along with a new Arlinn for players to use in Brawl.
They’re both excellent, for sure, but it’s not enough. With Innistrad: Midnight Hunt coming out in a couple of weeks, and then Crimson Vow coming out in a couple of months, we were expecting to see a Commander deck for the tribe, to be honest, but that’s not happening.
What are the Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Commander decks?
So, first up we’ve got the new Midnight Hunt decks. We know that these are called Coven Counters and Undead Unleashed. One is a Green and White Human deck (or Witch, but not with that Creature type, the point is it’s based around the new coven mechanic), and the other is Blue and Black Zombie deck.
Coven Counters is headed up by Leinore, Autumn Sovereign, who’s a four mana Green and White 0/4. They have a coven trigger, which reads, “At the beginning of combat ono your turn, put a +1/+1 counter on up to one target creature you control. Then if you control three or more creatures with different powers, draw a card.” Doing +1/+1 counters isn’t exactly a new thing for Green and White, but hopefully there’ll be lots of fun bits in the deck itself.
Undead Unleashed is helmed by Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver, who is a four mana Blue and Black 3/3 that reads, “Whenever another Zombie you control dies, if it didn’t have decayed, create a 2/2 black Zombie creature token with decayed.” Decayed is the new keyword that means the creature can’t block, and it gets sacrificed at the end of combat if it attacks. It also allows you to sacrifice a Zombie in your end step to draw a card, which is nice. This one’s a little more interesting, but isn’t exactly new either.
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What are the Innistrad: Crimson Vow Commander decks?
Now, we don’t know as much about the Crimson Vow decks, but we do already have the names for them. The names are Spirit Squadron and Vampiric Bloodline. We can assume these will both be tribal decks too, albeit with a focus on whatever keywords will be applying to Spirits and Vampires in the next set.
Spirit Squadron is likely going to be a Blue and White deck with a focus on the ethereal undead. Given the colors, we’d not be surprised to see some kind of tempo nonsense going on here either, and no doubt there’ll be a focus on flying and protection too. Given the recent Spirit cards with Strixhaven, it’s also possible this will be a Jeskai deck, but we’re not holding our breath.
Vampiric Bloodline is, therefore, likely to be a Black and Red (or Mardu, but again, unlikely) deck themed around the new Vampire keyword. There’s also likely to be subthemes of both lifegain and sacrifice, maybe with a small touch of stealing stuff too, as converting things is a big part of being a Vampire. Both of these decks will probably be fun too, but Aside from the Spirit deck, it’s hard to feel as though we’ve not seen everything like this before.
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Why is there no Werewolf deck?
So, all of this leads us up to this point: where on Earth, or Innistrad, is the Werewolf deck. Zombies, Vampires, and Humans have all had more than enough representation when it comes to Commander, while Werewolves are a tribe that barely gets noticed most of the time, mostly due to the lack of good options for the commander itself.
That last part is about to change, sure, but it still feels as though we could have had a day and night themed deck given that this mechanic is new to Midnight Hunt too, despite it basically being a more logical way of explaining the Werewolf transformation, and one that we hope causes an errata onto old Werewolves where possible.
The lack of support for this tribe is puzzling. This is especially true given Gruul’s lack of interesting Commanders in recent days. Obviously, that’s just our opinion, but the recent Adventures in the Forgotten Realms had the Gruul deck feeling genuinely uninteresting, and it was the first-ever Gruul precon anyway. So, what’s going on here, why aren’t Werewolves getting love, and did Gruul upset someone at Wizards of the Coast? What do you think?
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